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CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the tenth of these trends: New approaches to assessment. We publish posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.

Explanation

Assessment plays a significant part of our education system. None of us would go to the doctor or visit the hospital with an ailment without an expectation that we’ll receive some sort of treatment to make us well. So too with education — assessment is the way we have of making the learning visible, and of applying some measure to the success of the learner in demonstrating what he or she has learned.

Historically the focus on assessment has been summative — applying measures of how successfully the learner can demonstrate what he or she has acquired through the learning process. There is a saying in education that “the pedagogy of assessment drives the pedagogy of instruction”, meaning that the focus on what is being assessed will often drive what and how we teach. We see evidence of this in the way many teachers and schools approach the challenge of assessing against national standards or NCEA: instead of assessment being the means of measuring student success, it becomes what shapes the curriculum and the way it is taught.

For decades our approach to assessment has also been shaped by notions of the physical place and time of assessment activities, leading to practices that require students to complete assessment activities in certain places at certain times. In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the importance of formative assessment, focusing on progressions in learning, and identification of next steps. Such an approach is gaining support internationally, with a number of initiatives looking at embedding assessment through the learning process

Drivers

The NZQA website lists a number of examples of assessment approaches in which they distinguish between ‘task assessment’ and ‘evidence assessment’. NZQA have also recognised that the increasing access to and use of digital technologies by students creates significant opportunities for assessing in different ways — using these technologies as the means of completing assessments that are no longer bound by the same constraints of time and place.

Digital technologies are opening up new assessment processes that cater for a learning-centred approach, including eportfolios, rubrics and badges for learning, providing a flexible mechanism for recognising achievements that can be orchestrated and managed by the learner. Today’s students leave lots of data trails – from demographic information, to how they read and highlight ebooks and interact online. The greater use of analytics tools to capture and process this data may provide even greater opportunities to tailor next-steps suggestions for learners, and to understand where the difficulties are occurring so that we can address them in our planning and teaching.

Implications

Thinking about these new approaches to assessment creates opportunities for schools to work with their learners in quite different ways, and to see assessment as a part of the learning process. Over the next few years there will be opportunities for schools to allow students to complete summative assessments using the NZQA digital assessment approaches as they come on stream. There will be opportunities for students to complete assessments at different times and in different spaces to the traditional exam room. But, this will rely on schools planning ahead to ensure there is the proper infrastructure in place and access provided to the appropriate devices for all students.

The growing amount of digital data being generated from learner activity will require schools to consider how they store, manage and report on this data, and how it might be used effectively to enable next-steps learning approaches. Schools must also come to understand and plan for the ways in which digital technologies will make learning more transparent – for teachers, pupils and their parents/whanau. This will have important consequences not only for learners who will receive greater levels of interest and support from home as a consequence, but also for teachers who will be required to ensure systems are in place to keep the data in school management systems current and relevant. It will also place increased demands on individual learners to take responsibility for managing and keeping current the artefacts in their personal learning portfolios as evidence of their learning.

CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the ninth of these trends: Gamification. We publish posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.

Explanation:

Gamification is the name given to the process of developing motivation and engagement by rewarding people with things that they want, and it often takes the form of points, acknowledgement of achievement, badges, prizes, and so on. You complete certain milestones and you are rewarded with something you want, something that is meaningful and engaging to you. The rise of computer gaming culture has meant that more and more research has gone into finding out what features make games so addictive for some people. The trend of gamification is really about how to reward, motivate, and engage people in learning.

CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the seventh of these trends: Global connectedness. We publish posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.

Most of us now have more opportunities to connect with others than ever before. Social networks, global branding and economic advancement, ease of travel and global communications – all accessed through a handheld device — characterise the world in which we live. I used to think that having a pen pal in Norway, to whom I wrote on delicate airmail paper, was the height of sophistication. Now I can talk to her face-to-face, share photos of our families, use Google Translate to write in Norwegian, even visit her town on Google Earth.

If you remember the world pre-Internet, it is truly something to be marvelled at. But it can also shock us; the now open, public nature of world events can harshly illustrate inequalities in living conditions, levels of prosperity and opportunities.

In this globally connected world, our challenge as educators is to prepare our learners to not only take advantage of all that this offers, but also to encourage them to question, investigate and act as global citizens.

CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the seventh of these trends: Maker culture. We publish posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.

Explanation

Think of learning at its earliest stage: a baby learning to play with blocks or manipulate objects in three-dimensional space. It’s something our human brains are hard-wired to do. Researchers like Dewey and Piaget talk about constructivism — suggesting that learning is an active process in which people actively construct knowledge from their experience in the world. People don’t get ideas; they make them.

This idea of making, of building, of constructing has a strong basis in research. Active learning increases the rate of learning faster than passive learning, Even just watching others build or make things fires up parts of our brain that are left untouched by passive learning.

Drivers

While the maker movement has been around in many forms, it’s only now that we’re starting to see technology catch up with our aspirations for a powerful, active, authentic education.

Last week we broke the bracket that holds up the towel rail in our bathroom. The first thing I thought was not, Oh, we’ve broken it. It was, ‘I wish we had a 3D printer’, because I could scan the broken part with the camera on my phone and print a replacement. And it’s conceivable that there will be some form of 3D printer in many homes in the foreseeable future.

Is your Nan having trouble plugging the jug in because of her arthritis? There’s your year 7 technology project. Learning about insects for science? Design and print a bug hotel that you can attach to a tree or a fence for insects to live in. It’s all made possible by the magic of 3D printing, and a range of 3D modelling software tools — many of which are open source, and able to be installed on any computer learners have access to.

Another driver of the maker movement has been the emergence of a powerful suite of small electronic microprocessors that you can programme with a bit of code. Often they snap together with little extras, like light or movement sensors or Bluetooth and wireless modules, and all of a sudden you’ve got something you can attach a solar panel and a rechargeable battery to, and you’ve got a completely self-contained, internet-connected data-gathering tool. So what do you want to know? How many sunlight hours there have been each day this month? What the maximum temperature has been every day this week? The Arduino and the Raspberry Pi might sound like funny names, but they are essentially tiny, extremely affordable computers that kids can add onto like Lego. This freedom and creativity is right at the heart of the maker movement.

Impact

Art, technology, design, music, film, science all come crashing together in the maker movement. Want to sew a circuit into the hoodie you wear when you ride your bike home so that a arrow made of LED lights on your back indicates which way you’re turning? Piece of cake. What about creating an interactive sculpture that changes colour depending on the kind of music you play in the room? No trouble.

So what’s the impact of all this possibility on learning? For one thing we've got more chance to unleash student creativity than ever before. And we’ve got the chance to really connect our learning to the real world for another. We can solve real world problems and give students the kind of voice and confidence

Implications

Our learners have the ability to shape and bend all sorts of technology to meet their needs — we need to make sure we’re giving them plenty of opportunities to do it. Design thinking and design processes need to be central to our planning, not only to meet learners’ needs but also to give them opportunities to meet others’ needs. We can start small:

Grab a little electronics starter kit that doesn’t need soldering skills or even a good understanding of circuits, and see what your kids can do with it.

Talk to your principal about getting a 3D printer

Download something like Sketchup so kids can start playing around.

Because, it’s this playfulness that’s at the heart of the maker movement.

CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the sixth of these trends: Learner orientation. We shall be publishing posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.

What do we mean by learner orientation?

It’s helpful to think of learner orientation in two ways: firstly, how does the learner orient themselves toward learning? And secondly, how does the school and community orient themselves towards supporting that learner?

Let’s look at the first one. For a long time, learners oriented themselves toward the end point of learning – the outcome, the grade, the qualification. It was assumed that if the learner emerged from school with a credential or certificate, that would open doors for them as they made their way through the world. And for a long time that was true — if you got school certificate or a degree, you could use that to secure a job and then learn all of the other required skills while in that job.

Impact

But now there are so many people with qualifications that having a credential or qualification is no longer enough. The various New Zealand curriculum documents have anticipated this shift toward actionable knowledge: applying our knowledge to make a contribution to our schools, communities and the wider world. The spirit of the NZC is to think about teaching learners, not subjects, and many people are thinking about ways to honour that spirit.

Which brings us to the second way of thinking about learner orientation: the way that schools are orienting themselves to support learners. When many of our current teachers were in formal education themselves, schools operated like benevolent dictatorships: teachers chose the right material and level of difficulty for the majority of the class and planned accordingly. But the more we learn about the brain and effective pedagogy, the more we know we need to meet all learners where they are, not where we’d like them to be. Everybody brings with them different levels of experience and interest when they arrive at class, and while some things need to be coherent and consistent, many other things need to be personalised. Frameworks like Universal Design for Learning encourage us to think about how different learners need things represented to them in order for learning to stick: reading written material, listening to a story, looking at a picture.

Implications and challenges

Wisely, some schools are taking a systems thinking approach to this view of learner orientation, recognising that in order to make progress, they need to reconsider not an individual component, but all of the elements we put in place to cause learning to occur:

Pedagogy: how we teach. How we orient ourselves to meet learner preferences, and these preferences change through a sequence of learning.

Curriculum: what we teach. How much is determined by the school and the curriculum documents, and how much space is left open for the students?

Assessment: how can we give students more control and ownership over what counts as evidence of learning?

Community: How do we tap into the learning opportunities and resources that exist in our communities

Physical environment: If spaces are not designed to command and control, but to activate learning in all its many different forms, what physical environments are needed?

Technology: what role does technology play in personalising learning? How can it make teachers lives easier so they can focus on the most important thing?

It’s not any one of these that will make a difference, but the interplay and the relationships between them all, and more importantly how we can look at the physical environments as an activator for this interplay. We call these physical environments modern learning environments, or flexible, open, agile environments, but really they’re just environments that allow us to orient ourselves towards the needs of learners.